Best mining Client and NameCoin?

[coolamasta]

Hey all,

Am new to BitCoins and mining them, have set myself up and been using BitMinter on a couple of AMD Radeon GPU's, I am using the native Java client but was wondering if there is any advantage to using another one such as cgminer, bfgminer etc?  Or indeed is there a better system I can use altogether rather than BitMinter?!

Also, NameCoin I can sort of see what it is but im not sure what I can do with them, is there somewhere that buys them or does it not work like that? Can't see great deal of info about it...

Any help much appreciated 

[coolamasta]

Any advice here people? 

[Zanatos666]

The advantage on using one program over another is familiarity, support (obviously many many users for cgminer and bfgminer so you can find answers easily), and the amount of tweaking you can do native to the program without having to use 3rd party programs like Trixx or Afterburer.  I have never used or even looked at bitminter so I cant say if it does or not.

As for NMC, unless you are merge mining, where they can be converted over to BTC, dont bother with them.  Only coins really worth mining at present moment are BTC and LTC.  Anything else you are just doing for fun, or with some far off hope that one day it will take off and you will have a cache saved up (like I did with i0coins back in the day. mined a few thousand of those over the course of a week, and sat on them, never lead anywhere).

[badgersong]

You should defiantly get better performance using a native client like cgminer.

[coolamasta]

Thanks very much for the replies guys, I downloaded cgminer earlier and im a bit confused already haha, assume I just need to carefully follow the windows-build.txt file all the way through to get it working?

I will ignore NameCoin for now then but I have been thinking maybe I will be better off trying out LTC over BTC, what do you think as I am only kicking out around 1100 Mhash 

[mprep]

Thanks very much for the replies guys, I downloaded cgminer earlier and im a bit confused already haha, assume I just need to carefully follow the windows-build.txt file all the way through to get it working?

I will ignore NameCoin for now then but I have been thinking maybe I will be better off trying out LTC over BTC, what do you think as I am only kicking out around 1100 Mhash 

Is that small?

[Zanatos666]

Thanks very much for the replies guys, I downloaded cgminer earlier and im a bit confused already haha, assume I just need to carefully follow the windows-build.txt file all the way through to get it working?

I will ignore NameCoin for now then but I have been thinking maybe I will be better off trying out LTC over BTC, what do you think as I am only kicking out around 1100 Mhash 

Is that small?

For LTC mining, no, I dont think thats small at all.  But again, never have done it, so dont know, but I see others kicking around similar numbers so I am guessing that is a good place to be and you can mine quite a bit of coins with it.

As for cgminer, plenty of tuts and youtube videos out there on getting started with it.  A little command line know how is needed, but easy to pick up. 

[coolamasta]

Cheers will have a quick look for a tutorial or youtube vid just to get me going, prob easy but im inpatient lol